Army Corps releases plan for dam management

By Nicole Montesano

Smoke Signals staff writer

The Army Corps of Engineers has released its long-awaited environmental impact statement on how it plans to manage the Willamette Valley system of dams, a report it began in 2019.

It is the first comprehensive review of the dam management system in two decades, the Corps said.

Tribal Council member Kathleen George said it fell short.

“We need bold and swift action before we lose Willamette salmon forever,” George said in a media statement. “The Army Corps of Engineers' big dams kill fish — yet its new operations plan is too slow, uncertain and half-hearted to meet the urgency of the moment. A historical decision determining whether Oregon will or won’t have Willamette salmon is before us right now. The best science says the Corps’ plan falls short. That’s not acceptable. All of us who value salmon must demand better.”

During the Legislative Action Committee meeting on Tuesday, April 15, George went further.

“Some of the improvements would take 20, 30 years,” she said. “They don’t have the funding to secure them. Some of the projects they’ve proposed would cost hundreds of millions of dollars that they don’t have and it’s very unlikely that Congress would appropriate. And so, they’ve made really no changes to those long-term proposals that are very unlikely to occur, to improve passage to Willamette salmon. So that is viewed by our team, and I think by salmon advocates everywhere, as a real failure, and folks will be doing what they can to raise awareness about that.”

George said the Tribe and other advocates believe that working with partners in Oregon is the “best hope of making improvements,” and getting the Corps to, “move more quickly to help our salmon while we still have a few left.”

George said the Tribe’s Salmon Strength Team has an upcoming meeting with the Corps and that Tribal staff are working on formulating a response.

In 2021, a federal judge ordered the Corps to take several actions to improve water quality and fish passage to avoid “irreparable harm” to endangered salmon and steelhead. However, the report says, the Corps “is reviewing the direct and indirect effects of these construction actions under separate National Environmental Policy Act compliance processes; therefore, they are not assessed in this Environmental Impact Statement.”

The report also notes that “The concept of Tribal resources, when viewed through a federal legal framework, is different than Tribal understanding of those resources.”

For example, it said, Grand Ronde’s statement noted that “Tribal cultures tend not to separate natural, cultural, historical, ethnographic, archaeological, ecological, spiritual, and subsistence resources from each other in terms of labor or categories.”

The Tribe emphasized that the dams are driving Chinook and winter steelhead to extinction and that the hydropower from the dams is not profitable. In addition, the Tribe “requested that Pacific lamprey passage be considered at all Willamette Valley System dams and reservoirs.”